Flanking the navpad are a quartet of soft-menu keys, call and end buttons, and a pair of prominent chrome keys: Menu and Gallery. The latter fast-tracks into a content sub-menu, containing images, videos, music and so on.

The 2.8in, 240 x 320, 16m-colour display is bright and clear, and does a fine job presenting images and videos. An ‘Auto pivot’ option means that thanks to its inbuilt motion sensor, the screen can switch orientation automatically, depending how the phone’s being held. There's a small secondary camera for face-to-face video calling.

The 8Mp camera gives the back a distinctly digicam look

The main-event – the eight-megapixel camera – gives the i8510's back panel a distinctly digital camera look. The lens array stands slightly proud of the back and has a lens cover built in which opens automatically and only when the camera is active.

As well as the obligatory shutter button, there’s a small slider for switching between still photography, video grabbing and your album of shots. The zoom rocker control is on the opposite side, so it's placed on the bottom of the phone when you're using the i8510 in camera mode.

There’s no optical zoom on this model, unlike Samsung’s G800, and we’d liked to have seen a more powerful and precise xenon flash rather than the dual-LED unit provided. Besides that, the phone’s camera hits the mark.

The autofocus system is very precise and works well - the two-step shutter enables you to get tightly focused shots, and there's a great macro mode for close-ups. There’s a plethora of adjustments you can make to the auto metering, exposure, white balance, ISO and brightness. Anti-shake and wide dynamic range options are included too, for avoiding hand jitters and dealing with difficult lighting conditions.